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A black girl’s hair clogs the drain in the bathroom sink. Her foster mom tells her it’s because the hair is the texture of steel wool.

Another girl looks for help with her hair, and, instead of giving her a wide-tooth comb and conditioner, the foster mother hands her a straightener or relaxer for her thick curls.

That is the norm for black girls in the care of Children’s Aid Societies in Ontario, says youth worker Shantel Hyndman, 23.

“When they do not know what to do with our hair, they straighten it,” she said.

Hyndman is with HairStory Right to Speak, a program of the provincial advocate for children and youth that has, since Friday, been giving 120 young people an artistic outlet for their stories.

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The youth from across Ontario have been holed up in a downtown hotel singing, dancing, writing, making photos and graffiti art, and connecting with one another in an arts conference that’s about much more than hair and addresses a host of systemic barriers they face.

“But they’re not trained in how to deal with youth who have a different cultural background from them, so youth are losing their cultural identity,” he said.

“If you’re not culturally responsive to a young person, the result for some, is internal hate,” said Hyndman.

“They learn to assimilate with the foster family, they learn to act like them, because there’s no room to be an individual or different in an environment like that,” she said.

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The under-resourced child welfare system is designed to provide children with physical care and protect them from violence, but it needs to provide more emotional supports, said Hyndman.

“They focus so much on the physical, they forget black youth have a culture, we have a healing process. We have strong spirits and if our spirits are not nurtured, if our mental health is not nurtured, if the healing process is not put in place, we will fall apart,” she said.

She quoted one of the teens, who said, “Jail is supposed to equal rehabilitation, but really it equals further segregation.”

“It is conditioning them to reoffend,” said Marcano.

Black teens being stopped by police, CAS workers who give up and send young people back to the homes that failed to support them in the first place . . . it all adds up to a failure of hope, say the youth workers.

“I see doctors. I see lawyers. I see politicians — a lot of them, actually — I see teachers. I see kids who want to be something so bad. But when they leave the hotel on Monday, they are going back into environments that don’t necessarily nurture what they want to be,” said Hyndman.

On Monday, the young people a rare opportunity to share their stories directly with government decision-makers. Minister of Children and Youth Services Michael Coteau‎, Ontario Human Rights Commissioner Renu Mandhane and provincial youth advocate Irwin Elman are among those who were expected to be at a “listening” table at the end of the four-day conference.

In a year, HairStory will issue its recommendations to Queen’s Park about how to address a culturally unresponsive care system.

Youth in care

31 per cent: The number of suspensions in the Toronto District School Board of black students, who represent just 12 per cent of the total high school population.

65 per cent: Portion of Toronto children in CAS care who are from the city’s African Canadian community, which makes up 6.9 per cent of the population.

Five times: The likelihood of a young black male going to jail compared to that of the general population.

10.7 per cent: Rate of unemployment for black Canadians, which compares to 5.1 per cent for Japanese Canadians and 6.2 per cent for non-racialized residents.

$9,101: The average wage gap between black Canadians and non-racialized workers.

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